The Society of Fellows hosts the Thursday Lecture Series (TLS), which runs regularly throughout the academic year. The Fall Semester TLS, our Fellows present their own work, chaired by Columbia faculty.

The Metaverse is a Lie: Tech-Utopias and the Politics of Hype

Lecture by Irina Kalinka
Chaired by Gisela Winckler

This talk explores the political visions underpinning various neo-reactionary tech-utopias, including seasteading, space travel, and the corporate science fiction film that is the Metaverse announcement video. Bringing these tech-billionaire-funded visions into conversation and highlighting common threads, this talk will show how they represent a particular genre of dreams about the future that caters to the fantasy of transcending earthly limits rooted in political disagreement, difference, and finite growth through technological development.

However, these are not exclusively, nor even primarily, visions of the future. By painting an idealized picture of where society could be heading under such technocratic, oligarchic, and anti-democratic governing systems, these tech-utopias promote neo-reactionary values in the present. They are also indicative of the larger political imaginaries that are popular across the tech sector and inform the design and management of the digital platforms that these tech billionaires oversee today.

Image Source: Samsung’s Virtual Reality MWC 2016 Press Conference | by pestoverde, labeled for reuse, Flickr.

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